PRIYA SARUKKAI CHABRIA

I have combined some excerpts of my creative writing with my responses to your questions as I think we need to respond to terror as an experience and phenomenon in as full a way as possible.

1. Have you ever felt ‘terrorized’ by something? Have you ever told / described it to someone? Has it found an expression in your work?

Doesn’t everyone, at some point in time?

Of course…

I primarily focus on how terror strips us of all that we know about ourselves and the world. By rendering us helpless, terror experiences break down our constructions of identity, belonging and reality. Who are we in such circumstances? Are we any longer human or humane?

It has frequently found expression in my work; however, the forms, stylistics and modes of address differ each time in the hope that such jeremiads pull the reader in to contemplate the experience.

In my novel, The Other Garden (1995) the destruction of the Babri Masjid caused me to search amidst bewildering and new paradigms to fix floating fragments of “Indian ness”. The novel asks: who am I? on personal, political, literary and spiritual levels. This necessitated the deployment of multiple voices, non- linear narratives, pastiche, recourse to myth, fable, ghost story and fairytale, among others. Of course, the question remains unanswered for my heroine, Anasuya, and me.

Both my poetry collections, Dialogue and Other Poems (2005, reprint 2006) and Not Springtime Yet (2008) confront various varieties of terror -but not only this. For instance, contemplating the war in Afghanistan and Iraq (and their wars on their people) I’ve transposed forms from 2BCE -2 CE Tamil war poems [1]and also worked with the imaginations of the ghazal and ballads because movements against terror are ancient, only its contexts are different. I am aware of the terror of being unable to resist environmental destruction and endangered species termination…[2]

In Generation 14 (2008), my speculative fiction set in the 24^th century, characters inhabit a space of amnesia caused by the Talibanization of consciousness, language and identity. The heroine is a clone who, braving annihilation, is regaining memory, and therefore, language. Yet she has to grapple with a terror known to our tribe, a terror that should not be named: The Wr_ter’s Bl_ _k.[3]

2. At a psychological / aesthetic / philosophical level, can terror be ‘represented’ in art? Would you like to name certain works (art/writing) in which it has been done effectively?

Can terror be ‘represented’ in art? I think maybe not. Can it be meditated on? Yes. The mother of all terrors is the terror of death aka the Terror of Time. This has been the meditative focus of many luminous works of literature and other arts. All terrors fall out of this womb, this Vishwaroopa.

There are far too many works to name. But off the cuff, any work by Bill Viola or Cai Guo-Qiang that present multiple startling and contemplative viewpoints .

I wish to emphasis that when I think about terror (in a writerly way), I begin to search equally for its opposite, tenderness, which twines and twins it like spiraling DNA.

3. Which would you consider to be the most terrorizing moment / event / ideology you have known?

You ask three different questions disguised as one! The most terrorized moment need not be the same as the most terrorizing ideology known, with which one can live for eons.[4]

Terrorized moments: Being stuck between floors in a steel shuttered elevator with a demented co-passenger who possessed enormous strength of voice and muscle but didn’t succeed in breaking open the doors..

Being stalked for months possibly ranks as personal, high-grade terror ‘event’.

But I have been rendered despairing and near mute by the various and continuous terror and hate ideologies that were perpetrated though history –and their manifestations today. Besides concerns for personal safety – and those of dear ones-these manifestos terrorize me in a way unplanned:

I do not know how to reconcile the fact that I belong to the same species as those who hate so viciously, and kill with such random pleasure. Yet, I must.

Yet again I seem to being losing my sense of identity, dissolving in a vortex that lack a center

I wonder what the true identity of our species is–for there is a tilt in everything. (Even our hearts are tilted; and the left and right hemispheres of out brain differ…)[5] Is our identity closer to the neat divide of terrorists who see the world as those who need to kill and those who must be killed; or my more murky and gentler vision? Which way is the tilt?

This seemingly equal balance of possibilities terrorizes me.

4. How do you respond to the rhetoric of terror(ism) in mainstream media and politics?

It sucks.

5. Have the terrorist activities around made you feel insecure?

I choose the easier option: I disclose the contents of my handbag without resentment, almost without provocation.

Open, open, open, open.[6]

Seek, and you shall find…?

If only.

[1]

Salma, pi-dog of Baghdad, says:

Americans are kind.
They leave blood on the streets
      for us to lick,
      and morsels of human flesh

      stuck
      to charred clothing.

They return us to our ancestors:
Wolves.

Salma’s friend, pi-dog Imrana replies:

You don’t hear and see so well
ever since the bomb went off in the neighborhood
      dump where you had littered
      six pups,
      one-eyed, one-eared, scar-faced Salma.

Listen:
I’ve heard
the scene of feasting is shifting
      overseas
      and underground,
      in tunnels long and deep.
And that the bombers talk in a language
we can understand, so to speak.
I’d trot there myself for the spread
if it weren’t that I lack
front feet.

(from Not Springtime Yet, courtesy HarperCollins Publishers (India))

[2]

(Light falls on the flowing
river, light falls through the flowing
river; light slits its bed and falls into
the dark absorbency of grief where forever
our unborn will sleep, in the womb of our greed)

[3]

“…Alone in the Comfort Capsule, I felt strangely still. As if I had already passed, unwritten, into history. As if I were a weightless speck that could not be discerned.
Yet, my breath hammered against my chest. I wondered: What is the weight of one’s actuality? Doesn’t this emerge from accountability, from grasping the moment?
I felt a vastness within me, a vastness without meaning, yet deeply beautiful.
Yet, who was I? To what species did I belong?

*

I laid an array of lipsticks on the floor. These were my tools.
The walls spread white around me, like the endless empty sheets within the computer I’d seen at the Museum.
I tried to write but felt my limbs were hacked off.
I tried to compose voice-tombs but felt pressed between thick airless sheets.
I tried to think but felt trapped within a hollow crystal cube that was morphing. The air within was petrifying into tar. I too was petrifying. I was tearing at my veins but no blood flowed.
This sensation was endless as the blank white sheets.
I got accustomed to this state.
As I lay within the whiteness I tried to think of something I was still used to. I could think only of mating, this lone new desire had not left me. Rather it quickened my blood and grew to fill the spaces of my mind. I thought of the long sleek hungers that push one onwards, onwards to becoming part of another’s body, I thought of the blinding moment after which I’d fall back into my own body, knowing again my body’s limits; I thought of the body’s silence when it rests, satisfied and calm after this voyage.
Had… had…
… My body continued to cry.”

(from Generation14, courtesy Penguin-Zubaan)

[4]

Dewdrops breaking into beads of blood
vs.
needles of rain that don’t dissolve on skin but pierce, their eyes vacant and small
vs.
the shadows of stationary clouds on flowing rivers that sink down on soft silt and sit, unmoving, underwater.

[5]

For verily it is said:
the heart , which is placed behind the lower two-thirds of the sternum, projects further into the left than into the right half of the cavity of the chest, thus extending in the median line about three inches in the former direction, and only one and a half in the latter. In other words, about one third of the human heart lies to the right and two-thirds of the left of the mesial plane. This being the case, there is, moreover, no center at the meridian; therefore finding the center is a notional idea …
As for the brain, which rests in the skull, and as for the skull that is supported on the apex of the vertebral column, sitting there rather like a mushroom cloud, caught…

[6]

… प्रचोदयात